Generally, it is known in nowadays cellular wireless communication technology that wireless communication devices operated within a cellular network provide at least one embedded identification unit. Those identification units are equipped with all those information allowing the wireless communication device to authenticate at cellular networks, which the user is authorized to work with.
With respect to allowing more flexibility, there are firstly concepts known to modify the information stored in the identification unit, without having to go to a service point of a cellular network operator, in particular the home cellular network, which is the cellular network serving the current subscription of the wireless communication device. This is in particular useful for users travelling through areas being covered by different cellular network operators. This is further of high importance for machine-type communication, also known as machine-to-machine or M2M communication, where the wireless communication device is or is part of a machine, which in certain use cases is not even capable to be moved. Here differences in coverage, tariff structure or overall contractual changes for a plurality of wireless communication devices lead to the need to quickly change subscriptions for the assigned set of devices.
Those methods are known under the name remote provisioning. The main task of remote provisioning procedures consists of the downloading of subscription information from a remote provisioning server down to the wireless communication device and storing that information in an embedded identification unit.
One issue which has not yet been addressed by solutions known in the art is the situation that a wireless communication device is not capable of accessing servers outside the home cellular network. This is due to the fact that the wireless communication device has access limitations towards remote provisioning servers.
This is in particular true in cases that the wireless communication device is not capable of using packet switched connections. There are certain wireless communication devices i.e. emergency call devices which do not support packet oriented data communication at all. Another situation is that a wireless communication device is operating only within a virtual private network, either provided by the cellular network operator, as part of the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) being part of 4G cellular networks, who disallows intraoperator access, or outside of the cellular network as part of a company network.
That means the known methods for remote provisioning service rely on built-in data communication functionality and capability of the wireless communication device. Furthermore in known methods the communication unit requires having the appropriate data communication method i.e. TCP/IP or UDP capabilities for supporting remote provisioning even when this functionality is not used by the wireless communication device for normal operation. In addition the existing TCP/IP functionality may not be accessible under all circumstances, i.e. bound to customer application. As a consequence many wireless communication devices are not able to access a remote provisioning server or can only follow the built-in functionality required today at high costs.
It is therefore a goal of the present invention to allow performing remote provisioning for those wireless communication devices that are not capable to access servers for remote provisioning outside the home cellular network.
A further goal is the reduction and optimization of the required built-in functionality of the wireless communication device.